Quai

This.

It is a real problem that a lot of people fail to understand why this is an issue.

Such impressive work, in so many ways. The amount of knowledge and expertise you guys brought to the project is immense!

I really enjoy this guys videos. The refreshing level of details. Great, geeky, humor.

I especially enjoyed his "rants" about the design of a old toaster, and traffic lights, of all things.

Obligatory comment about Opera: Afaik, the video pop out feature was published in Opera 37, May 2016, a few months before it was added to Safari.

I, for one, want to know Rick's story...

How was the day he got famous internally in Wacom, just because some XML that no one was meant to see..

So, there are hardware in phone whos job is to recognize trigger words and phrases like "Hello Google" , "Alexa" and "Siri" and wake up the phone so it can listen to the users request. They probably have limited memory, but I would not be surprised if they can store a few hundred low quality rules for detecting certain words. The ad-network already have a profile on you, and could compile a list of trigger words you are likely to use based on your profile. They upload this list to the phone, and lets the phone build up a frequency list that they can use to better target you with ads you are likely to click on.

All this would just require a few thousand bytes transferred between the phone and the ad-network. Since they are using information they already have about you, and there are little or no additional CPU or network usage it would be really hard to detect.

Statistics. We wanted to know how different campaigns worked, how the user retention from different partners was, and also benchmark how well the autoupdate system worked. While I worked for Opera this was strictly for internal use, and a very limited set of people had access to logs and raw data.

The same ex-opera people was the master minds behind the netinstaller tracking :) I was not implying that Opera is any more adware/malware than any other software.

This was implemented way before Opera changed ownership, and as far as I can see from the outside, not much has changed in this code. The main difference I see, is that they have removed the source IP from the JSON.

So, if any, they are tracking less data in that data blob after they changed ownership.

(I worked on this feature at Opera back in the days)

Did you know that every Opera install on windows and mac using the net-installer gets a uniquely modified exe or zip file with information about the download so that Opera can track where/why a browser was downloaded?

On windows they modify the PE header of the exe, and adds extra information to a certificate table at the end of the file, without affecting the signature of the file. (Last 4 bytes of the file gives the size of the payload, giving you the offset to start reading a string that starts with OPR followed by a base64 encoded string, which contains a checksum and a json object. The json object contains country of origin, http_referrer of the download, a timestamp, UTM-parameters seen on the referrer, the user agent and a uuid assigned to the download. This uuid is kept for the life time of the browser install.)

On mac, the process is a bit different, but there they use appledouble (._-meta files) to modify the zip-file on the fly while downloading including the same type of data.

And that's where Opera failed. Marketing. It was much more than just "host some files from your browser"; if was a full ecosystem with a "app-store" and technology that made it work behind NATs etc.

IMHO, the thing that killed Unite (or Alien, as the project was called internally at Opera) was the lack of a killer feature/app that could show off the technology to end users. Too much focus on technology, and way to little focus on apps. It kinda reminds me of Google Wave in many ways.

(At an internal hackaton in Opera, me and some colleagues built a rc-car controlled trough Opera Unite with a webcam and custom javascript plugin to control a servos directly from the browser. We also ended up building a picture frame powered by Opera Unite, and got to present it at a stand at MWC Barcelona. Fun times!)

If you want to make German look bad, sure, but a "better" translation of car insurance would be Autoversicherung.

I mean, "car insurance" is much better than "motor vehicle liability insurance" too.. ;-)

I was involved in implementing the first browser-to-browser, and browser-to-mobile sync. Opera Link (codename Pangea) was my first really large project in the company, and while desktop team had multiple persons working on the feature, the server side was designed, implemented and maintained by two guys plus a QA person.

We decided not to encrypt the user information for multiple reasons; user friendliness, data recovery and naivety. The internet was a different place back in 2008 (Opera 9.50). Both me and the other guy used the service our self, and was paranoid about the user data. Only we had access, and only we would see user data while fixing bugs.

I especially remember one bug where the database suddenly started growing faster than we expected. The frontend servers started eating more and more memory. In the end, we discovered that a larger porn site network had started serving their full size images as favicons, and that Opera Link had started syncing multi-megabytes of Base64-encoded favicons in our already bloated XML protocol. That was the first time I was introduced to 'Rule 34'.

We maintained the control over the server side and userdata until the end of the Opera Link project. We where never asked to turn over userdata to the company, except for aggregated stats for speeddials (only top X lists, not including unique URLs).

After we had announced the end of Opera Link, the userdata was scheduled for deletion, but we had to shut down the service a few weeks early, after a sysadmin started dban on the userdata mount instead of the local disk ;-)

It's not unheard-of; https://www.airspacemag.com/daily-planet/spysat-and-shuttle-...

Man, I love personalities like Cliff Stoll's!

I mean, if a person can make reverse polish notation sounds like the most interesting thing you have ever learned, they are worth listening to!

You mean something like the Clipper chip[1]?

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clipper_chip

Tell that to the MongoDB-gang..

"Mongo" is a norwegian/swedish(?) slang for a retarted person. It's derived from the word "mongoloid" which was an person with Downs or a similar syndrome. The latter word is not commonly used anymore.

Facebook does something similar with SSH-access to their infrastructure.

https://code.facebook.com/posts/365787980419535/scalable-and...

The BS-factor is high on this one..

"An ideal single-photon source has yet to be created." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Single-photon_source

Still, detection of single particles has been hinted to during the Apollo program; https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cosmic_ray_visual_phenomena

I'm sorry to tell you that your Opera Link (not to be confused with Opera Sync, the syncing platform for the new products) has already been deleted. Opera stopped providing the Opera Link service December last year.

The servers has been decommissioned, and according to Norwegian law, the user data has been deleted.

The developer stream is public, and so is the exact build they used[1].

[1] http://get.opera.com/pub/opera-developer/39.0.2248.0/

You might argue that not rendering ads is a valid method to save battery.

I have had to replace the screen on my M3800 twice now in one year (it develops two shadowy lines on the screen), and there are some other issues that I don't like; The "sound card" had an bug that makes it give off a quite noticeable white noise. It also has a slight coil noise that I'm not a huge fan of.

First three norwegian cities I looked up was given the wrong name. (Plesund (should be Ålesund), Bodi (Bodø) and Tdnsberg (Tønsberg)). So, I think it is safe to say that there are encoding issues in the data set.

Yngve worked serveral years for Opera Software, and had a major role in both our TLS implementation and general security.

On side note; I envy the employees of Vivaldi, since they are now getting Yngves famous chocolate cake. (He used to bake cake for the entire Oslo office back in the days) :)

I favor "ping 2130706433" ;)

APM is powered by a 8 bit controller.

Isn't it a bit late to predict that NOW!?.. :P

I really enjoyed books like "Rendezvous with Rama". It isn't often that books written about the future in the 70's still are as mesmerizing today.

It might seem far-fetch, but Electroconvulsive therapy[1] are still used to treat severe depression even today.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electroconvulsive_therapy

"Sorry, your browser doesn’t support our live video stream."

My browser supports live video just fine. It's -your- streaming software that lacks support for my browser.

This illustrates why I never have, and never will own a Apple product.